Saturday, February 21, 2009

Heroines

I know many romance writers who write from the perspective of their heroine. This seems perfectly natural since they are women and it would seem that they would be better at getting inside a female character's head. And since a good number of romance readers are women, it makes sense this would be a successful tact to take.

I however, am not one of those writers. Female characters are the bane of my writing attempts. Anytime a heroine becomes the main focus of my story, when her point of view is prevalent, my writing stalls. Now being a woman myself, this seems odd to me. Why can't I control my female characters? I had one female character hold up a story for three months because I just couldn't get her to compromise. I had written a strong female who was asking why exactly she should give an inch even if the hero came crawling. Sigh.

Anny Cook wrote the other day about a story that she just couldn't get to work. I have one of those. I have but the ending written and I can't seem to figure out how to get my hero and heroine back together after both of them make a stupid choice about trust and what it means. No, no one cheated on anyone, it had to do with the truth of the hero's identity. Anyway, I want my heroine to remain strong and believable, I was irritated recently when one of my favorite writers took the easy way out in a short story. I'd been waiting for that character's story for ages, but in the end was disappointed because the heroine did a 180 in her attitude toward the hero at supersonic speed.

So, to the writing muses, who are supposed to be women, help me out here.

3 comments:

Sometimes (not very often) but sometimes, one of the characters (USUALLY the woman--after all, isn't that true in real life), the heroine makes a conscious choice to offer that trust, unearned, but willingly offered out of love. And that hero, having learned how fragile a thing trust is, values it all the more.

I have the exact opposite as an issue. I cannot write for any great length of time from a male perspective to save my life. Doesn't matter what person it's in, just can't do it. It's pathetic. I realized that one of the reasons my NaNo project stalled out at the 10,000 word mark was because the main character was a man. I need to get in touch with my inner man. Maybe I should sacrifice a virgin character to Apollo or something. Maybe your short-story writer didn't have a good group of fellow writers to workshop with and tell them, "Your character did a complete 180..."

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